Brian> NAT has simply pushed us back to the pre-1978 situation.
On the contrary, NAT has allowed us to maintain global connectivity without
requiring every system to have a globally unique address. NAT is what has
prevented us from returning to the pre-1978 situation.
That's not to say it wouldn't be better to have a million more globally
unique addresses. Sure it would, unless that would stress out the routing
system unduly. If adding a million more globally unique addresses will
stress out the routing system, then one might argue that a solution which
provides the addresses but doesn't change the routing system isn't really
deployable, and hence doesn't really solve the addressing problem. I think
this is the point that Noel keeps trying to drive home, and I'm not sure I
understand what the answer is supposed to be.